From left, Jessica Johnson, Judi Earl, Cheryl Dixon and Christina Berriman Dawson in “Key Change,” at the Fourth Street Theater.Credit
Richard Termine for The New York Times

Although the language occasionally takes on a darkly lyrical hue, music plays no role in “Key Change,” a moving, intimate and superbly acted drama about women’s lives in (and out of, and in again) a British prison. Written by Catrina McHugh and directed by Laura Lindow, the play was “devised with” women from an actual prison, drawing specifically on their experiences both before and during incarceration.

The production, which opened on Wednesday at the Fourth Street Theater, having won acclaim at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is aptly spare and simple, running just under an hour. The actors use rolls of masking tape, which they affix to the empty stage floor — and occasionally modify — to delineate their cells and other fixtures of the prison.

The dialogue is crisp, minimal and overlapping. The women sometimes finish one another’s thoughts or phrases, or speak in unison, life inside having brought them into an unusual and sometimes uncomfortable intimacy. They move between directly addressing the audience — describing their histories and the grim, dehumanizing details of their lives in prison — and interacting with one another, fighting over time at the phone or exchanging stories. Most of these concern unfortunate choices involving men. (The four primary actors also play ancillary roles, including the bad boyfriends, while the fifth, Lorraine, played by Victoria Copeland, sits apart as a sort of stage manager, mostly looking bored as she reads a celebrity rag but occasionally chiming in.)

Angie, played by the terrific Jessica Johnson with razor-sharp edges that do not obscure her character’s humanity, is the toughest of the lot. She’s serving a six-year sentence – her third. She was kicked out of her parents’ house while still a teenager, when they discovered she was seeing a man 10 years older. She lost the baby she had by her older boyfriend (although she would go on to have two more) and was soon on heroin, referred to as “gear”: “That was new to me, feeling safe,” she says of the euphoria it brought. She didn’t feel safe for long, of course.

The much less hardened Lucy jokingly points to her and wryly says, “revolving door.” Lucy, played by Cheryl Dixon with a moving sense of an innocence still retained, found herself with three children at a young age, and a husband — only 23 — who grows increasingly morose and abusive. (He cheats, too.)

Kim (a nice, no-nonsense Judi Earl), is the oldest of the prisoners, with great-grandchildren. She met Angie in a women’s shelter. (Lucy also fled to one when her boyfriend savagely beat her, but eventually returned to him, at least briefly.)

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Among the sad aspects of “Key Change” is the sameness to the women’s stories: the mistakes made at impossibly young ages, the disastrous romantic liaisons, the efforts to break free, the slides into drugs. We don’t hear many details of the crimes for which they were jailed, though most seem to involve theft, petty or otherwise. (Angie bitterly notes that she got her six-year term for stealing only £320 —about $500.)

There’s more detail about life in prison: the process of induction, the anxiety and fear of the first nights, the adjustment to the noises, the many things they miss on the inside — including their families, shopping, clothes, Christmas, as well as less benign pleasures like cocaine. Among its other virtues, “Key Change” resists sentimentality, although there are some touching passages when the women speak of the joy that comes from just seeing a magpie.

Christina Berriman Dawson brings a smidgen of bouncy energy to her performance as Kelly, another repeat offender and drug abuser. She vows that her fourth incarceration will be her last: “If I get nicked again I’ll get 10 years,” she says, adding to Angie, “You should think about it, Angie, six years is a long time, you want to get yourself sorted.”

“I will,” says the defiant Angie, to which the rest respond, in voices varying from scornful to sympathetic: “You won’t.”